Mass Non-Compliance: A report on the 18th October protest against digital ID in the UK.
After the shock of the “COVID era” to our collective understanding of freedom, the extent of acceptable government intervention and the extent of public compliance, many of us asked ourselves what our future would look like. Would other, new modes of intrusion and domination beyond lockdowns and medical coercion now be harder to impose on an “awakened” populace? Might there be more dystopia down the line? We had to wait and see.
Under the pretext of controlling illegal immigration, a digital ID scheme for the UK has been announced. That means we no longer have to wait for our answer. More dystopia is coming and it is time to resist in whatever way we are able. Yesterday marked one of the first acts of mass resistance against Digital ID - a march in London.
Starting at Marble Arch, attendance was disappointing, with no more than one or two thousand people present. On asking a few people why this could be, ‘fatigue’ among those who were ‘awake’, and a feeling that street protest is ineffective were given as reasons.
For everyone I talked to, it was a simple act of personal resistance; something that they could tell people close to them that they acted in some capacity. Doing something beats doing nothing. Fortunately, numbers appeared to pick up as the march progressed along its route. As I spoke to more people, it was clear to me that most, if not all, of them were also opposed to COVID measures and had attended similar demonstrations in the past.
People were keen to express their thoughts about the timing of the digital ID announcement and the actual underlying motives. The view was expressed that digital ID is an integral component of the rush towards agendas 2030 and 2050. It is also seen as a vital part of pre-emptive measures to control anticipated rising civil unrest as a consequence of terrible policy decisions which have resulted in stagnant wages, inflation, a crumbling infrastructure, and the strong possibility of mass job losses due to AI implementation at scale. Tangential to this , digital ID was also viewed as an enabling technology for a techno-feudal mode of production. It was also encouraging to see some protesters warning the public at large of the dangers of digital ID.
Other concerns expressed included privacy implications, ease of public control, erection of a control and tracking system similar to that in China, and of general mission creep. Today digital ID is being sold as a measure to get on top of illegal immigration. However, according to the Tony Blair institute, tomorrow it’ll provide “benefits from a more targeted policy response to shocks”:
‘Overall, a digital ID could therefore help reduce the cost of future crises in several ways including: 1) better targeting support payments to subsets of the population in response to national shocks; 2) reducing the cost of administering targeted compensation schemes by helping to verify citizen eligibility; 3) helping the government to plan better for future crises and reduce their cost.’
I am not aware that having the ability to digitally identify people has ever been demonstrated to be a key determinant of the ability to reduce the cost of a ‘crisis’. The most pressing human crises today, not mentioned in the institute’s musings, are: war, poverty, economic mismanagement and, above all, a political ruling class that actively perpetuates these crises. Digital ID is clearly not a credible way to address these crises.
There was also indignation over the rollout of digital ID being something that wasn’t part of an election manifesto, with one attendee telling me he felt we are victims of a “bait and switch.” Indeed, there’s no explicit mention of a digital ID in the Labour manifesto. The closest we get is:
Sadly, too often we see families falling through the cracks of public services. Labour will improve data sharing across services, with a single unique identifier, to better support children and families.
The energy of the march was generally positive with less of the anger that pervaded the earlier anti-lockdown and vaccine mandate protests of 2021 to 2022, though there was some surprise at the extent of the police presence.
At Downing Street, Andrew Bridgen expressed a lack of faith in the political process, saying: ‘this is not the world that we thought it was.’ Regarding how to engage with the process, one protester thought that we should engage with our MPs on digital ID, not because it would necessarily influence how they vote on upcoming legislation, but rather as a tactic to let them know that they’re being watched and have them expend resources on any correspondence, e.g. aide time. Certainly an interesting take on resistance!
The climax of the march was at Downing Street, where more direct expressions of alienation such as chants of ‘you work for us’ and ‘Keir Starmer’s a wanker’ were the order of the day.
The age demographic of the protesters I could see suggested that Digital ID is more of a concern for the middle-aged. The poor representation by young people is concerning and implies a lack of awareness among that cohort of the threat posed by Digital ID. A facile explanation for this is that a generation more at ease with tech is more comfortable with tech ‘solutions’, however suspect they may be. My message to the young is this: if it goes wrong, your prison sentence in the emerging digital gulag will be far longer than the old timers who tried to warn you about it.
One attendee expressed the view that if the geographical origin of signatures on the recent petition against digital ID were anything to go by, party lines are irrelevant. For her, the principal factors were urbanisation and ethnicity. Cities like Oxford, Cambridge and London had the fewest proportion of signatories to the petition, implying less discomfort with a technocratic system of control in those populations. Birmingham, Leicester and Bradford with their higher ethnic minority populations, were also under-represented in the petition against Digital ID. Obviously, more research would be needed to ascertain whether these really are the primary factors.
What we do know is that ethnic minorities in the UK are more likely to be politically disengaged. However, that disengagement – in this case under-representation in a petition – cannot automatically be interpreted as a vote for digital ID. After all, ethnic minorities put their money where their mouths were when the government coerced the majority of the population into accepting an experimental COVID injection – ethnic minorities demonstrated greater non-compliance than their white counterparts. What people do sometimes contradicts what they say, or in the case of ethnic minorities, what they don’t say.
As with COVID era demonstrations, all political persuasions were present. I encountered Reform UK banners, confessed Guardian readers and Libertarians. However, I did not detect a more visible left-wing presence which may have implications for any deeper analysis of the signatories to the petition.
Saturday’s protest was a good first step but it came nowhere near the turnout and energy of the old anti-lockdown marches. If we believe that street protest is part of an effective resistance toolkit then we need to do better.
Re the last paragraph of the artical about low turnout. It was a much larger march than the lockdown marches had in attendance in the begnning. It took over a year of marching, years 2020/21, to get huge crowds of well over a million people. I remember this very well, I was there.
Stop putting a downer on turn out, it was fantastic for a first major march.
These marches will expand exponentially over the coming months.
Keith has a fight on his hands with this one, and he is going to lose.
On the comment about there being "less of the anger that pervaded the earlier anti-lockdown and vaccine mandate protests of 2021 to 2022", I have to ask: "WHAT anger, exactly?!"
My recollections of those amazing gatherings of the awake portion of British humanity during the Convid era are almost wholly to do with their positive, friendly, humorous and mutually supportive atmosphere.
In fact, I felt a greater sense of solidarity and good nature during those events than I have experienced during the vast majority of the so-called Leftist marches and demonstrations I've attended.